In recent years, interest has grown in parsing voters’ attitudes by their community’s degree of urbanicity or rurality. The Marquette Law Poll asks respondents, “Would you describe the place where you live as urban, suburban or rural?” If necessary, we clarify, “Urban is a big city like Milwaukee, Madison or Green Bay. Suburban is a built up place close to a big city and rural is less built up with fewer people and further away from a big city.”
This self-description is interesting, but it’s not entirely clear what it tells us. Each individual defines those terms in their own mind, and many places don’t fall neatly within the three offered categories.
Using the USDA Rural-Urban Commuting Area Codes (RUCA) I have created an alternative, objective zip-code based geography classification for the Marquette Law Poll. “Objective” does not mean “correct.” It simply means that the same data-based methodology has been uniformly applied to each case.
The original USDA RUCA classification is based on both a zip code’s location (e.g. within a census-defined urbanized area or urban cluster) as well as how its residents commute. Because it is a measure of economic activity, RUCA does not further distinguish between central cities and suburbs within metro areas. Obviously, the city-suburb distinction is crucial for political research, so I add a new principal city code. This consists of all zip codes with a majority of their population inside a metropolitan statistical area’s principal city (or cities).
With my addition of principal cities, here are all 11 RUCA categories along with the number of Wisconsin zip codes in each. I combine the 11 RUCA codes into 5-category, 4-category, and 3-category alternatives as indicated. The 5, 4, and 3-category RUCA breakdowns are available as crosstab variables on the Marquette Law Poll interactive crosstab web application.
| zips | ruca11 | ruca5 | ruca4 | ruca3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 65 | Principal city | Principal city | Principal city | Urban areas |
| 106 | Suburban core | Suburban core | Suburban core | Urban areas |
| 138 | Strongly tied to urban area | Exurbs and large towns | Exurbs and large towns | Exurbs and large towns |
| 22 | Weakly tied to urban area | Exurbs and large towns | Exurbs and large towns | Exurbs and large towns |
| 38 | Large town | Exurbs and large towns | Exurbs and large towns | Exurbs and large towns |
| 44 | Strongly tied to large town | Exurbs and large towns | Exurbs and large towns | Exurbs and large towns |
| 7 | Weakly tied to large town | Exurbs and large towns | Exurbs and large towns | Exurbs and large towns |
| 71 | Small town | Small town | Rural and small towns | Rural and small towns |
| 42 | Strongly tied to small town | Small town | Rural and small towns | Rural and small towns |
| 16 | Weakly tied to small town | Small town | Rural and small towns | Rural and small towns |
| 223 | Isolated rural | Isolated rural | Rural and small towns | Rural and small towns |
Click through these tabs to view which zip codes make up each category, for each RUCA level.